Compulsive Debate as Rightness-Compulsion Wrong Attractor: The Inquiry-Foreclosure Architecture, Epistemic-Dominance Basin, and the Return to Genuine Inquiry

Compulsive debate — the chronic need to argue, correct, and establish rightness in intellectual and interpersonal exchanges, organized around epistemic dominance rather than genuine inquiry, producing systematic foreclosure of curiosity and collaborative understanding — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CD in the landscape of genuine inquiry. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as genuine inquiry: the capacity to engage intellectually with real curiosity about what is true — allowing one's views to be changed by evidence and argument, pursuing understanding collaboratively rather than adversarially, and tolerating uncertainty without needing to resolve it through dominance.

W_CD is rigorously distinguished from appropriate disagreement, legitimate intellectual debate, healthy assertiveness, and genuine commitment to truth. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: rightness as identity requirement (the compulsive debater cannot be wrong without identity threat; being wrong is not an epistemic event but a selfhood crisis; D(ξ) is generated by any challenge to one's position), dominance-inquiry incompatibility (the compulsive debater's goal is to win rather than to understand; all intellectual activity is organized around prevailing, making genuine learning structurally impossible), and escalation and intellectual impoverishment (compulsive debate progressively degrades the intellectual environment — interlocutors disengage, relationships become adversarial, and the epistemic ecology that genuine inquiry requires is destroyed).

The Inquiry Paradox is central: compulsive debate reliably produces the intellectual defeat it is organized to prevent — by foreclosing genuine inquiry, the compulsive debater becomes progressively less able to think clearly, more isolated from corrective feedback, and more epistemically impoverished. Nine formal propositions characterize the genuine inquiry ground state, the rightness-compulsion wrong attractor, the three maintenance mechanisms, the inquiry paradox, developmental roots in rightness-as-worth environments, and return paths through IFS manager work, epistemic humility cultivation, and graduated uncertainty tolerance.